


The Light Gets In

by mombasas



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek Hale Buys Some Plants, Domestic Derek Hale, Lydia Martin & Stiles Stilinski Friendship, M/M, Monster of the Week, New Year's Resolutions, Pack Family, Pre-Slash, Team Human
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 20:23:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16394477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mombasas/pseuds/mombasas
Summary: "It’s a rubber plant," Derek says.“Wait, is it real or is it rubber?”“It’s a real—it’s a live, growing rubber plant.” Derek looks like he wants to be pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration, but crosses his arms instead. Stiles grins.(A New Year's fic that grew legs and a tail.)





	The Light Gets In

 

Stiles tilts his head back, staring up at the flickering neon sign above the 24-hour CVS. The night is quiet and he can hear the buzz of the transformer inside its plastic. This close to midnight, it’s cold enough that his breath clouds the air in front of him. The pavement curb he sits on feels gritty, and he nudges a cigarette butt with the toe of his sneaker. When he swipes a hand under his nose and inspects it in the red glow of the sign, the blood on it has already dried into dark brown flakes. Good. His nosebleed has finally stopped. He pokes at the sore skin around his eye. It hurts bad enough that he drops his hand immediately.

Next to him, Derek exhales. Stiles looks at him out of the corner of his eye. Derek has one arm still wrapped protectively across his stomach, although Stiles is pretty sure the gash has already healed and anyway most of the blood on Derek’s shirt isn’t even his own. Derek’s gazing up past the humming sign, at the stars strewn through the crisp air beyond it.

Somewhere behind them, blocks away, a chorus of excited cheering breaks out. Derek’s body jerks a fraction of a second before the noise reaches Stiles’s ears. Then the sound of distant fireworks echoes through the empty parking lot, though the bursts themselves are out of sight. They sound like gunshots.

Stiles makes a considering noise, wishing his cellphone wasn’t miles away in the cupholder of Derek’s car so he could check the time. Still, he knows what the fireworks mean. He nudges Derek in the side with his elbow.

Soon they’ll have to make their way back to the Camaro, and then he’s going to sleep for about a year, and once he wakes up he’ll have to invent an excuse for his black eye, and his dad will pretend to believe it, and he’ll go over to Scott’s and play Call of Duty and ignore the way _Scott_ will look at his black eye, too much like his dad for comfort, and when he gets home Derek will be there and they’ll figure out what to do about the increasing number of feral omegas arriving in Beacon Hills. But for now—

“Happy New Year, dude,” he says.

“New year, new us,” says Derek, deadpan.

Stiles can’t explain why, but he laughs hard enough that his nose starts bleeding again.

 

 

Stiles has never really been into New Year’s resolutions, but late that night, as he’s giving himself a stealthy, less-than-sexy spongebath because he’s got omega blood all over him and a real shower would wake his dad, he thinks about them anyway. Stiles’s mom had loved New Year’s. She made a resolution every year, would get a secretive sparkle in her eye just after Christmas, and always refused to tell Stiles or his dad what she’d decided on.

“It’s like a birthday wish, baby,” she’d tell him. “If you tell, it won’t come true.”

“Your mom doesn’t understand how resolutions work,” Dad had stage-whispered to him once and his mom had rolled her amber eyes, winking at Stiles when his dad wasn’t looking, like they were the only people in the world who were in on the joke. 

Stiles swallows three Ibuprofen and washes them down with a cupped handful of water from the sink. He turns off the faucet and stares at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Too-big eyes, the skin around one of them red and already purpling in a stain that meets the bruise on the bridge of his nose. Flat mouth, pale skin.

The house around him is still, nighttime-heavy, and he hears the heating system turn on with the familiar rattle he’s known since he was born. Down the street, someone’s dog is barking. _What would I even resolve?_ he thinks, blinking tiredly at his reflection. There are too many options, all of them equally impossible. Be a better son. Be a better friend. Be a better person, maybe someone who didn’t help Derek nearly dismember a man tonight. Maybe someone who did, but felt sorry about it after.

Stiles flicks the bathroom light out as he leaves. He brings the damp, bloody towel with him and shoves it to the bottom of his hamper so his dad won’t see it.

 

*

 

Winter break doesn’t end for another two days. Stiles sleeps in late and wakes to discover that his dad’s already left for the station, doubtless to help process all the now-sober and regretful DUI arrests from the night before. His eye is swollen, so he throws the makings of a stew in the slow cooker, sets it to run all day, and retreats back upstairs with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his face.

Flopped on his bed with his good eye cracked open, he checks his phone and sees three missed texts: one from his dad asking hopefully if he should pick up takeout for dinner, one from Derek that just says _Alive?_ and a row of eggplant emojis from Erica, which is confusing until he scrolls up and remembers that they’d been talking about her two-year anniversary plans with Boyd earlier, at which point the emojis become horrifying.

He texts his dad a triumphant negative on the takeout, ignores Erica’s message, and sends Derek a thumbs up. Then he moves the melting bag of peas so they cover his whole face, and spends fifteen minutes or so just staring at the inside of his own eyelids.

 

Over Call of Duty later that afternoon, Stiles informs Scott that he and Derek shared a tender midnight kiss. Scott pushes him off the couch.

He does it gently enough that Stiles knows he’s still hung up on the shiner, even if they’re not going to talk about it. Frankly, Stiles would prefer they didn’t. Scott and Derek get along better than they used to, but they’re far from friends. To be fair, Stiles isn’t sure how many of Beacon Hills’s other resident lycanthropes can really claim to be friends with Derek either.

The pack is still alive, somehow. Still a pack, if a weirdly dispersed one, all connected by one or two threads that all lead back to Derek like a constellation—Boyd and Erica attached at the hip, Isaac like a tall shadow behind them, Jackson and Lydia and even Allison, and Stiles and Scott, though Scott still breaks out the separatist manifesto occasionally. Usually when Derek’s not around to hear, Stiles has noted.

Derek and Stiles have settled into something just on the outside of long-suffering tolerance (on Derek’s part) and reluctant resignation (on Stiles’s), mostly because episodes like last night’s misadventure have become a new normal for them over the past few years. Stiles tries to keep quiet about it. He’s not hiding anything, but between Derek’s impatience with Scott and Scott’s admittedly well-founded issues with male authority figures, he figures it’s better for everyone if he doesn’t make a big deal about things. Still, Scott almost always knows when he’s been with Derek; his nostrils flare and he gets a little squinty.

Lately, the flare-and-squint has been happening with increasing regularity. Beacon Hills attracts an ungodly amount of supernatural creatures. In one of his rare straightforward moments, Deaton admitted to Stiles and Isaac that having a mostly-stable pack in the area put Beacon Hills on the map in a way it hadn’t been since the Hales were alive.

“You can’t tell me Derek’s family had to deal with this shit on the daily,” Stiles had said, gesturing at his goop-covered torso.

“Talia’s pack was strong, well-established,” Deaton had replied. “As Derek’s may come to be, one day.” Isaac, drenched in translucent slime himself, had snorted where he stood holding a clean pair of scrubs. 

“Why is it always you, dude?” Scott asks now. Apparently, Stiles thinks with a sinking feeling, they are going to talk about the shiner. “If Derek knew there was an omega, why didn’t he take Isaac? Or Erica or Boyd? Or Jackson?”

Stiles shrugs before Scott can run down their entire graduating class roster. He keeps his eyes on the television screen. “He does sometimes,” he says. “I think he just figures I’ll get into trouble on my own anyway, so he might as well keep me nearby.”

“He can’t just use you as bait!” Scott says, scandalized. Stiles, while he appreciates Scott’s outrage on his behalf, very carefully does not point out that Scott himself is still topping the “uses their packmates as objects for the greater good” list, and has been ever since he forced Derek to bite Gerard Argent two years ago.

“It’s fine,” he tells Scott. “It wasn’t objectively the worst night.” 

“You said you got thrown into a tree and had to watch Derek rip the guy’s arm off.”

“It wasn’t, like, all the way off,” says Stiles. He glances sideways. Scott does not look mollified.

 

 

Stiles heads over to Derek’s apartment the next morning since Derek hasn’t deigned to commit his usual breaking-and-entering act on Stiles’s bedroom window. It’s the last day of winter break, so Derek doesn’t look surprised to see him in the doorway, just steps aside and lets Stiles slip in past him.

Derek’s current apartment—his fourth living space since Stiles has known him—is sparse and old but mostly clean, with two separate bedrooms, which puts it well above the train depot and just below the absurdly expensive condo he’d squatted in for the second half of Stiles’s sophomore year. Isaac sleeps in the second bedroom most nights, only returning to his foster parents’ place when they notice he’s missing, which isn’t too often. Stiles knows he’s out with Scott right now and feels satisfyingly mature when he realizes the thought doesn’t cause a pang of annoyance. Isaac’s alright. Still an asshole sometimes, but Stiles really can’t cast stones about that.

The Stilinski home is still bedecked in Christmas decor, though it’s sagging sort of dejectedly now. He’ll have to drag the tree out to the corner soon, and pack away the garlands of fake holly. Stiles and his dad have spent Christmas with the McCalls ever since his mom died, but his dad still insists on decorating every year.

Derek’s apartment is bare of holiday cheer. Stiles realizes, suddenly, that he has no idea what Derek does for Christmas.

A half wall divides the apartment kitchen from the living room, and there’s an honest-to-god dining room table pushed against it, albeit one that Stiles found on the side of the street and coralled Boyd and Erica into helping him drag back to the apartment because he was sick of having to eat takeout standing up. Derek never said thank you, but he also hasn’t gotten rid of it, so Stiles counts it as a win. The carpet is a hideous greenish color and there’s nothing on the walls except what Stiles calls the murder board, in the far corner by the window. The murder board is an ever-changing bloom of mug shots, handwritten notes, and grainy photocopies from the bestiary thumbtacked directly to the stucco wall. How Derek expects to get his security deposit back, Stiles does not know.

The apartment is depressing as hell, and even if Derek pays rent every month like a real person, it still feels like he’s squatting there. There’s a sofa, the one that came with the apartment, but no coffee table, and—

“Oh my god,” Stiles says, pointing at the window sill. “What is that?”

“It’s a plant,” says Derek, looking at Stiles like he’s the world’s biggest idiot, which Stiles would buy except for the way Derek’s ears are tinged pink.

“Is it _real_?” Stiles tosses his bag onto the couch as he crosses the room to poke at one of the broad leaves experimentally.

“Yes,” says Derek. He sounds defensive. “It’s a rubber plant.”

“Wait, is it real or is it rubber?”

“It’s a real—it’s a live, growing rubber plant.” Derek looks like he wants to be pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration, but crosses his arms instead. Stiles grins.

“Cool.” Stiles squints at it, moves the terracotta pot a little where it rests on the cheap plastic saucer. The leaves are glossy and dark green, paler on their undersides. It looks like a small tree, not a houseplant. The Home Depot price tag is still stuck to the back. It informs him that Derek Hale spent $12.98 on a _Ficus elastica:_ bright indirect light, frequent watering. “Why?” Stiles asks, turning around.

“Why what,” says Derek, who has moved to put the half-wall between them. He looks like a cornered animal. Stiles abandons the plant to lean his elbows on the wall.

“Why’d you buy a rubber plant?”

Derek shrugs and flashes his least sincere grin. It’s all teeth. Stiles recognizes it for the defense mechanism it is. “The windowsill needed a splash of color.”

A surprised laugh makes it out of Stiles’ mouth and he swears he sees Derek’s body relax a little. It’s obvious he won’t be getting a straight answer, and for once in his life, he’s not in the mood to push. They’ve been doing this a lot lately: treading close to each other’s tender spots, staying long enough to make a point, leaving before the damage becomes permanent. Stiles has never really had the restraint needed for that last part, but something about Derek, the way his face closes off when his back’s against the wall, makes him particularly cautious. A rubber plant is a weird thing to get defensive over, but it also doesn’t seem like it’s going to get Stiles or anyone he cares about killed, so he files it away for later.

“We need to talk about the omegas. And the rest of the supernatural menagerie. We can’t keep this up, dude.”

“Don’t call me dude,” Derek says reflexively. The tension has already returned to his shoulders. “I’ll get Isaac to come next time, you don’t have to—”

Stiles throws his hands up in exasperation. “That’s not what I meant! You can’t keep doing this, Derek.” He turns to dig in his backpack, spinning back around with a sheaf of paper in his hand. “Look. Look at this.”

He’d spent five Adderall-fueled hours putting the graphs together and he’s pretty sure even Lydia would be impressed with them. He labeled the axes and everything. The first one charts the frequency of trespassing creatures within Beacon Hills, color coded by type. The feral omegas outnumber the others, but the page is still an alarming riot of color. Stiles has thoughtfully titled it “WHY WE’RE FUCKED, DEREK,” which seemed both necessary and funny at 3:00 in the morning but feels a little aggressive now. “Three months ago it was one every few weeks,” he says. “Now we’re up to an average of one every six-point-four days. They’re getting more frequent.”

Derek remains silent, thick eyebrows drawn into their perpetual frown. That’s fine. Stiles has more evidence. He flips to the second graph. The x-axis remains the same, a three-month range of dates, but the y-axis is labelled with a frowny, angry-looking emoticon. Stiles jabs a finger at the upwards-swooping scatterplot. “I made a scale,” he explains, “based on how bad you got your ass handed to you.” Derek’s scowl deepens. Stiles rolls his eyes again. “Fine, it’s for overall nastiness.”

“So they’re coming more often, and they’re crazier,” says Derek, crossing his arms. “I can handle them.” He doesn’t seem impressed by the graphs. This irks Stiles.

“You don’t get it. If this keeps up, we’re going to see a double event by February.”

“I can handle it,” Derek repeats. Predictably, the _Pacific Rim_ reference goes right over his head. That’s okay; Stiles’s expectations are pretty low when it comes to Derek and any media produced after 2007. Normally he’d make a fuss about it, nag Derek until he agreed to watch it just to get Stiles to shut up. It’s on Netflix now, and they have Jackson’s password thanks to one particularly boring full moon. Stiles and Scott have been slowly fucking with his watch list. For now, though, he lets it go. They have bigger fish to fry.

“You at least need to bring the betas in on this,” Stiles argues. “There’s only so many times you can bleed on me, my dad’s starting to notice that my shirts are disappearing. Actually, there’s only so many times _I_ can bleed on me. Plus I think Erica’s starting to feel left out, you know how much she loves hitting stuff.”

He crosses the room and sets about thumbtacking the graphs onto the murder board with extreme prejudice. When he turns around, ready to make the convincing argument that Isaac’s dad’s cemetery has a limited number of open graves for body disposal purposes, Derek’s looking at him with an unreadable expression. His eyes flick to the side, like he’s studying Stiles’s black eye. It’s turned an impressive mottled shade of blueish green.

“Okay.”

“Derek, I’m ser—what?”

“I said okay,” Derek says, like it’s not a big deal. Like he just goes around casually agreeing to things all the time. Stiles catches himself gaping and stops quickly. He doesn’t want to discourage this behavior.

“Oh. Okay. Uh, good.”

“I’ll talk to Erica and Boyd tonight.”

“Okay,” Stiles repeats, like an idiot.

“Okay.”

They stare at each other for a minute until Stiles realizes that Derek isn’t going to say anything else. “I’ll just, uh. I’ve gotta go get some groceries.” He focuses harder than he really needs to on zipping his backpack up, swinging it over one shoulder and heading for the door before he says something stupid or Derek changes his mind about being a responsible alpha.

He turns suddenly in the doorway. “I didn’t mean you shouldn’t still call me,” he says. “Because you should. Call me, I mean. When you need help, or whatever.” He shrugs the shoulder with the bag swinging from it. Derek’s inscrutable look is back, but he nods once, a short, jerky movement. Stiles closes the door on his way out.

 

*

 

The next day is the first day of the new semester. Stiles is in a foul mood because his dad finally caught him at home and noticed the black eye. He’d spun a story about a lacrosse mishap with Scott, but he’s pretty sure his dad isn’t buying it. Dinner had been tense, Stiles staring down at his plate and his dad pouring himself a second finger of whiskey instead of taking another helping of the pork chops Stiles had cooked. He’d been gone when Stiles got up the next morning, but he’d left a thermos of coffee on the counter for Stiles, which just makes him feel guiltier.

They’re divided up alphabetically for homeroom, which means that Isaac, Lydia and Scott are down the hall with Señora Navarro, while he and Erica are stuck with Jackson and Mr. Hayes, the biology teacher, for the first fifteen minutes of every weekday.

Lydia and Jackson are back together like their breakup never happened. Jackson still generally looks like he’s one bad day away from shoving Stiles’s face into a locker, but Lydia voluntarily moved to sit across from him in AP Calculus last semester and didn’t stab him with her pencil once, so Stiles thinks he’s doing pretty good on that front.

Boyd and Erica and Isaac are all joined at the hip, too, though Isaac manages to spend a lot of time with Scott as well. Derek’s halfhearted mentoring, or maybe just the passage of time, have done more to mellow them out than Stiles had dared to hope. There’s still a lot of leather happening but nobody’s threatened him or assaulted him with automobile parts, which feels like a win. In fact, just before break Erica offered to assault _Jackson_ for Stiles, which was really considerate. Stiles reflects, for a moment, that his standards for functional relationships have maybe lowered more than they should.

The wolves spend the full moons together at the train station. According to Scott, this usually involves a lot of parkour and beating the shit out of each other until they’re tired enough to eat pizza and watch movies. Derek apparently supervises. Scott always acts weirdly guilty afterwards, but Stiles notices the way his shoulders loosen. Violence and Scott have never gotten along, but Stiles suspects that the full moon turns it into something approaching catharsis.

Allison kept her distance more than the others at first, but the awkwardness that comes from being manipulated by your grandfather and almost killing your friends dissipates pretty quickly, as it turns out. Stiles hated her, a little, at the start. He knows she was partially responsible for stringing Erica and Boyd up in the Argent basement. The scene starred in his nightmares for months after: their eyes, wide and frightened above the duct tape; the sparks chasing up and down the chains. The way he hadn’t done anything to help them, too busy getting beaten up by Gerard.

He’d driven Isaac home from the warehouse much later that night, hands trembling on the wheel of the Jeep as the adrenaline wore off. Everyone else had left already, but Allison’s ring daggers had bitten Isaac straight and deep, down to his shoulder blades. It had taken almost twenty minutes for the wounds to stop sluggishly pulsing out blood. Stiles had waved both Derek and Scott off, not looking either of them in the eye. His entire body was throbbing. He’d left the Jeep running, afraid that if he turned it off it would never start again.

When Isaac had healed enough to walk under his own power, Stiles drove him back to the train depot. In the car, pale face washed red from the glow of a stoplight, Isaac wrapped one hand over Stiles’s where it rested on the gear shift. Stiles looked down and watched as Isaac’s veins ran black for a moment.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Ditto,” Isaac replied. “Light’s green.”

When they reached the depot, Stiles hadn’t even had time to throw the Jeep into park before Erica emerged from the darkness, yanked the door open, and nearly pulled him out of his seat. Behind her, Boyd and Derek lurked in the doorway, two dark shadows against the darker night.

“Are you okay?” she’d demanded, grabbing his chin and tilting his head to see the bruising better. Stiles had shaken himself out of her grip, searching her face.

“Yeah, what, are you okay? How’d you get out?” he’d asked.

“Chris Argent let us go. We came straight back here, but everyone was gone. We were just leaving to find you all when Derek showed up.”

Erica had looked like shit. Stiles was, suddenly and overwhelmingly, so, so glad that she and Boyd were alive. “I’m sorry—” he’d started. Erica had shaken her head immediately, cutting him off.

“Shut up, Stilinski. We’re sorry too. We all fucked up tonight.” She’d looked back at Derek as she said it. Derek hadn’t met her eyes.

Stiles had gotten home around two in the morning and fallen into an exhausted, guilty sleep anyway.

In the weeks that followed, he hadn’t been sure if the remnants of the anger he felt at Allison were real, or if he was projecting his own sense of helplessness about the situation onto her. Part of him hadn’t cared. But another part, a larger part, had watched her pick listlessly at her lunch across the cafeteria, and worried at it like a scab. He’d watched from the steps of the school while Lydia squared her shoulders one afternoon and grabbed Allison by the wrist as she’d walked towards the parking lot, bullied her into Lydia’s own car, and driven away with her. And a few months later, after Scott headed off for another full moon at the train depot, Lydia had texted him her address. When he’d shown up, Allison had been sitting at the marble island in the Martins’ enormous kitchen, an equally enormous glass of wine cradled in her hands. Lydia had passed another to Stiles. He’d accepted it with suspicion.

“Is there wolfsbane in this?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Lydia had replied. Her tone was straightfoward, free of its usual edge of irritation. “Drink up. We’re getting over ourselves before anyone else ends up dead.”

And somehow, they had.

 

*

 

The day passes quickly. He and Lydia have AP English together this semester, along with Isaac and Boyd. Then there’s Spanish, which he shares with Erica even though she’s fluent, and gym, where Finstock threatens the class with a new unit on golf. They’ve all had two semesters blissfully free of Adrian Harris, but he, Isaac, Lydia, Scott, and Allison have all elected to brave AP Chemistry.

Harris separates Stiles and Scott before they can even take their backpacks off. “Argent, move up, you’re with Stilinski. McCall, with Yang,” he orders. Scott winces; Rebecca Yang might be the only person in their year with a shorter attention span than Stiles.

“Hey, if anything explodes, you’ll heal,” he reminds Scott. Scott stares at him in horror for a moment, long enough that Harris heaves a long-suffering sigh and asks him if he needs a map to find his partner.

Allison shoots Stiles a smile when she slides onto the stool next to him. He doesn’t miss the way her glance catches on his black eye. “Another omega?” she asks, looking away to skim over the instructions for the day’s lab.

“Yeah,” Stiles nods. He pulls out a pen and then, remembering Allison’s propensity for losing hers, grabs a second one and nudges it across the table. “Just one, but they’re coming more often.” It’s not information that Stiles would have volunteered a year ago. Now, though, Allison’s considering expression makes the anxiety roiling in his stomach calm a little. He glances over the instruction sheet quickly.

“What does Derek think?”

Stiles shrugs a little. “He said he’s gonna bring the betas in more.” Allison measures out 25 milliliters of acetone, her tongue poking out in concentration. She stays quiet, sensing that he’s not done. “We’re on a timer, though,” he says at last.

“Graduation.” Allison tilts her head at him. “He’s not going to be able to handle them by himself, when we leave.” It’s a statement, not a question. Stiles bites his lip. They haven’t talked about this—something awkward, too uncertain, stretching across the whole patched-together pack. He knows Scott’s applied to Davis’s vetarinary program, and back in September he caught Boyd staying after History class to speak with Mr. Singh, clutching a handful of colorful brochures. Stiles split his applications, most of them to the northern UCs, some scattered along the eastern seaboard. His grades aren’t perfect, particularly since he’s started spending a few nights a week stumbling around in the forest instead of studying, but they’re alright. He’s worried he won’t get in anywhere. He’s worried that he will, and he’ll have to choose: staying close to his dad, to Beacon Hills, or running.

Allison’s gentle kick to his stool breaks him out of his thoughts. “We’ll figure it out,” she says confidently. “Also, you’re about to knock over the beaker.” She’s dimpling at him and Stiles can’t help but smile back. He gives himself a mental shake and tries to focus on the lab in front of him, just in time to hear an ominous shattering noise from the back of the classroom and Harris’s voice, gearing up for one of his signature shouting sessions. When Stiles turns around, Scott has his face buried in his hands. Next to him, Allison muffles a laugh.

 

 

*

_where are you?_ Stiles types out a few days later, leaning against the door to Derek’s apartment after school.

It takes Derek three minutes to answer. _Not home._

 _no shit_. _im outside._

 _I’ll be back in 10_ , Derek replies.

Stiles sits down in the hallway, pulls out his copy of _The Tempest,_ and kills time by starting Act I. They’re doing a Shakespeare unit in English this semester, which Scott is already complaining about. He likes the modernists, the philistine, but Stiles loved the _Tempest_ when he read it for an ambitious book report in eighth grade and is happy to read it again.

Prospero is berating Miranda for her inattentiveness when Derek finally shows up. Stiles scrambles to his feet. Derek isn’t wearing a coat even though the temperature is in the 40s and Stiles himself is bundled in two massive sweaters and a thick scarf. He’s empty handed, which means he was probably at the train station. They really only use it on the full moon, but Stiles knows he checks on it throughout the month anyway.

Derek glances down at the book and raises an eyebrow. “Full fathom five thy father lies,” he says, and Stiles experiences a real moment of confusion before his brain catches up. “Of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.”

“Whaaaaaaat,” says Stiles.

Derek smirks as he unlocks the door. “Shakespeare invented the phrase ‘sea change.’”

“Yeah, I know,” Stiles says distractedly, shutting the door behind them. “You’ve read the _Tempest_?”

This time both of Derek’s eyebrows rise. “What, you don’t think I read?” He sounds offended. 

“It’s just, you don’t look like a Shakespeare fan,” Stiles says, gesturing to Derek’s outfit as evidence. He’s pretty sure that the stain on Derek’s jeans is old troll blood.

Derek doesn’t look at him when he says, “I was getting my Master’s in English literature, when Laura came back here.”

Stiles gapes. He’s not sure what’s more surprising, Derek’s revelation or the fact that he’s volunteering information about himself in the first place. “Really?” he asks. He tries to picture Derek as a graduate student, buried in books, maybe working as a TA, bitching about his dissertation. It turns out to be easy to imagine.

The apartment is warm, and Stiles strips off one of his sweaters as he moves towards the kitchen. He’s starving.

“I’m starving,” he announces, opening the fridge to inspect its contents. It’s basically empty and he shoots Derek his most disappointed look. Derek appears unimpressed.

“You have a house,” he points out. Stiles shrugs, because it’s easier than explaining that his dad has the day off of work and Stiles, in a new personal low, would rather avoid his dad entirely than lie to him again. Derek either reads all that from the shrug anyway or decides it’s not worth fighting about, because he walks over to the cabinets and tosses Stiles a loaf of bread, wrapped in rough brown paper stamped with the logo of a local bakery. 

“What is this, nineteenth century France?” Stiles complains. He takes it anyway, and ends up making do with some eggs and butter he finds in the fridge, a depleted pepper grinder, and the bread, which turns out to be soft on the inside and satisfyingly crusty on the outside. Derek has high standards for bread, apparently.

A few minutes later, the eggs are frying. They hiss satisfyingly in the pan when he prods at them with a spatula. Derek moves to peer over his shoulder and that’s when Stiles sees them: a row of small plants, lined up almost sweetly on the windowsill over the sink.

“Huh,” he says to himself. There are three of them, spring-green succulents tinged an impossibly delicate blue at the tips, like the shells of birds’ eggs. When Derek hums an enquiring noise, Stiles says, “Nothing,” and then, “Tell me about Shakespeare.” 

*

 

Much later that night, Stiles is awoken by a loud, frantic pounding on the back door. He throws himself out of bed before his brain-body connection has fully engaged, operating on a shock of adrenaline and instinct. He slams his hip painfully into the doorframe on the way out of his bedroom, doubles back to grab the baseball bat he keeps under his bed, and almost trips as he stumbles down the stairs.

It was raining when he went to bed, but it’s more like a downpour now. Thunder rolls, not far off. A quick glance out of the window shows two figures huddled on the doorstep, close enough that they look like one shadow in the weak, yellowy streetlight. One of them has familiar curly hair.

Stiles, swearing, drops the bat and fumbles to unlock the door. Isaac stands there, one of Erica’s arms slung over his shoulder and his own arm holding her around the waist. They’re both soaking wet. Isaac is supporting most of her weight, and Stiles’s brain glitches for a moment as it tries to process the reason. Erica’s other arm, the one not around Isaac’s neck, is coated in blood so thick and fresh that it looks like red paint. Her shoulder is a mess of torn flesh and as Isaac adjusts his hold on her, the streetlight catches on the rounded white of bone.

“Jesus fucking—get in,” Stiles says, moving aside and willing himself not to vomit. Erica’s wild blonde hair is braided sloppily over her shoulder, and the end of the plait is bloody, too. It looks like it’s been dip-dyed. Blood drips slowly off the knuckles of her limp hand. “Why isn’t she healing?”

Isaac eases through the threshold and Erica makes a pained, keening noise that will probably fuel Stiles’s nightmares for the next month. Her teeth are gritted and her face is pale, wet with tears or rainwater. She’s wide-eyed, her pupils dilated. Whatever she’s seeing, it isn’t them.

“Don’t know,” Isaac answers. He’s out of breath and almost as pale as Erica, but Stiles can’t see any of his insides on his outside so he figures Isaac’s okay for now. “It wasn’t an omega. Looked like a dog.” He doesn’t have to say that whatever it was, it wasn’t a regular dog; the wound would have healed in minutes.

“Shit. Shit, okay,” says Stiles, sticking his head outside to check that they haven’t been seen before shutting the door. “Get her into the bathroom.” The living room is closer, but Stiles knows from experience that it’ll be easier to get blood out of tile grout than carpet.

Isaac maneuvers her through the house carefully while Stiles eels down the hallway in front of him, slapping at the bathroom light switch and digging the first aid kit out from under the sink. His dad’s on the night shift tonight, so he doesn’t bother being quiet. There are old towels in the back of the linen closet and by the time he’s fished one out, Isaac has deposited Erica on the closed toilet.

The damage goes all the way up to her neck, torn skin and muscle and what must be the top of her humerus exposed to the light. Stiles takes quick, shallow breaths, in and out through his mouth, as he peels the scraps of her shirt away from the wound. Then he presses one of the towels firmly over Erica’s shoulder. She hisses in a breath that turns into a choked-off cry of pain halfway through. Her pupils are still blown wide like black holes, even in the bright light of the bathroom, and they dart back and forth like they’re tracking something invisible.

“Erica, hey,” he says. “You’re gonna be okay, okay, you’re gonna be fine. Can you talk to me?” Erica makes another low whining sound when he applies more pressure, but she doesn’t answer him.

“What’s wrong with her?” asks Isaac. Stiles barely keeps himself from snapping at him, pushing down at the panic rising in his throat.

“I don’t know,” he says instead. “Hold this, keep the pressure on it.”

He lets Isaac take over towel duty and turns to dig out a few more. They’re basically rags at this point, but his mother had purchased them, and his hands clench in the fabric involuntarily. After she died, everything she’d owned had equal, terrible weight: her favorite sweater, her perfume, her car keys, the hideous blanket Stiles’s dad had hated and loudly plotted to throw away when she wasn’t looking, which is still folded over the back of the couch. 

They go through four of the towels before the wound finally clots, the torn muscle slowly beginning to knit back together. He and Isaac have been taking turns talking to her, and when Isaac tries again, she blinks a few times before focusing on his face.

“Y’look like shit, Lahey,” she says muzzily. Isaac breathes out a shaky, relieved laugh. 

“Oh my god,” says Stiles. “You are never allowed to do that ever again. I feel like I’m going to pass out.” He takes a stumbling step backwards and sinks down onto the edge of the bathtub.

“Sounds good,” Erica mumbles, slumping sideways until her head rests against Isaac’s stomach.

 

It takes them a while to get her bandaged and cleaned up, or at least as clean as she’ll be getting for the moment. Isaac’s carefully wiped the area around the wound, and they had her bite down onto the least-bloody towel when Stiles poured disinfectant over it, but the rest of her still looks like a scene from _Carrie_. He and Isaac aren’t much better, but at least Isaac’s clothes have mostly dried.

“It needs stitches, at least,” Stiles worries. “I could literally see bone, dude.”

“Cool,” says Erica. Isaac huffs a laugh and when Stiles makes an outraged noise, she rolls her eyes. It’s reassuring. “I’m healing, I can feel it. Just slow.”

Stiles squints at her. She’s still washed out in the light from the bathroom overhead, but not quite as ghostly as she looked two hours ago. There’s no pink on the bandages, so she isn’t bleeding through.

“Fine,” he allows. “But I’m calling Derek.” He half expects Erica to put up a fight; it’s nearly three o’clock in the morning, and although Derek’s her alpha, she’s proud and independent as hell. Instead, though, she nods tiredly.

“Let me clean up first.”

Isaac retrieves plastic trash bags from the garage, and they shove the towels and Erica’s ruined shirt into one of them. The bra she’s still wearing is saturated with blood, but neither of them says anything about it. Stiles hides the bag at the bottom of the trash can outside. The rain is starting to let up. When he gets back inside, he can hear their voices, low under the rush of water in the shower.

“Keep the wound dry, assholes,” he says through the door.

“Yes, Mom,” Isaac calls back.

Stiles ducks into the laundry room and scrubs his hands clean in the deep porcelain sink. He keeps his gaze carefully above the basin, staring at the row of detergent bottles on the shelf. There’s a basket of clean clothes atop the dryer and he grabs a pair of track pants and one of his flannel shirts once he’s done. Erica won’t be able to pull anything over her head for a while, so button-downs are probably best. Stiles leaves it on the floor outside the bathroom and adds a bottle of Gatorade after a moment of consideration. He checks the hallway and the back steps to make sure there aren’t any bloodstains that his father will notice. There are, so he cleans them up as best he can. Then he goes upstairs, sits on the edge of his bed, and feels around in the tangled sheets for his cell phone.

Derek picks up on the second ring, tone urgent even though his voice is blurry with sleep. “What’s wrong?” 

“Everyone’s fine,” Stiles says quickly. “Isaac and Erica are here—her shoulder’s fucked up, it’s not healing like it should be, but it’s stopped bleeding and we got it bandaged okay.”

“I’ll be there in five,” Derek says, despite the fact that his apartment is at least a ten minute drive across town. He doesn’t hang up, and Stiles can hear rummaging sounds in the background and the jangle of keys. “What happened?”

“Isaac said it looked like a dog. Sharp teeth.” A sudden worry strikes him. “Boyd was home tonight, right?” Stiles hears the Camaro’s engine start.

“His dad’s out of town, he had to stay in with his sisters. He should be safe.”

“Oh,” says Stiles. He doesn’t need to ask about Jackson; he’s a reluctant part of the pack at best, and he and Derek interact as little as possible outside the full moon. The silence stretches on for a while.

“She’s okay?” Derek asks.

“Yeah,” Stiles tells him again. He tries to tell himself that, too. Erica’s fine. He doesn’t want to think about what it says about him, that he can watch the pack commit acts of startling violence—can commit those acts himself—without blinking, but seeing Erica so clearly hurt in the aftermath of one sends his head spinning. “She’s downstairs getting cleaned up.”

There’s another silence, neither of them saying anything. “Are _you_ okay?” Derek asks.

Stiles swallows. “Yeah.” He rubs one hand over his face and notes distantly that he missed a spot when he was washing up; there’s a reddish smear in the fold between his middle and fourth finger. “Something was wrong with her, though. She didn’t—she wasn’t seeing us. Her eyes were open but it was like she wasn’t even in the room with us.”

“Pain can—”

“It wasn’t the pain,” Stiles cuts him off.

“Something in the bite, then. Or maybe the claws,” says Derek.

“Any idea what could do that to a werewolf?”

“No,” says Derek. “But we’ll figure it out.”

Stiles is almost too taken aback by Derek’s use of “we” to register the sound of a car door slamming, echoing through his phone and bedroom window simultaneously. “Dad’s not home, use the back door,” he says. Derek responds by hanging up, and Stiles hears the door creak open a moment later.

Downstairs, Isaac and Erica are curled into each other on the couch. Erica’s fast asleep, looking strangely small. Her damp hair is loose around her shoulders, and she’s pulled the sleeves of Stiles’s flannel shirt over her hands. The Gatorade bottle is empty on the side table. Isaac is awake, speaking quietly to Derek. The alpha is crouched in front of them, one hand on Erica’s bare ankle. Black lines wind up his arm. Stiles must make some noise where he hovers in the doorway, or maybe Derek can just tell that he’s there, because he stands up and tilts his head towards the kitchen.

Stiles follows him, turning on the light over the stove. It makes the kitchen feel softer, quieter. Outside, the worst of the storm has passed; the drop of rainwater from the gutters sounds like an uneven metronome. Derek is silent for a long moment. He’s soaked, his t-shirt plastered to his chest and hair standing up in wet spikes.

“I’m gonna take them back to the apartment,” he says finally.

“’Kay.” The lateness of the hour hits Stiles so abruptly he sways. The adrenaline that shocked him straight from sleep into crisis has finally washed out of his veins, leaving him blinking tiredly at Derek. 

“Lock the door when we leave.”

“Cop’s kid,” Stiles reminds him, jerking a thumb at the baseball bat where it’s propped by the threshold. “I’ll be fine.”   

Derek nods, awkwardly. He’s still not moving. “Thank you,” he says.

“For what?” Stiles asks. Possibly he is already asleep, and this entire surreal night is actually a stress-induced night terror. The panic in Isaac’s eyes. The wet gleam of Erica’s shoulder. Derek Hale, standing in his kitchen at three in the morning, shivering a little, dripping rainwater onto the linoleum. The light from the stove catching on his stupid, hopeless, beautiful face.

“Taking care of them,” Derek says.

And maybe Stiles should be offended at the implication that what happened tonight is something he needs to be thanked for—that he’d ever do anything else, that just standing by would even be an option—but Derek’s expression is cracked open, too vulnerable. Too honest.

“Anytime,” Stiles replies, and means it. And then, “Don’t freak out.” Before he’s even fully understood his own intentions, he’s moving towards Derek. There are a dozen excuses—it’s late, he’s so exhausted he can’t think straight, Derek’s face is broadcasting his fear and his relief and, most shocking of all, his gratitude, louder than ever before—but before he can rationalize it, he’s pressing forward into Derek’s space, enfolding him in a tight embrace.

Derek’s frame is rigid for a long moment and then, suddenly, his entire body curls closer to Stiles, and his own hands are coming up to rest on Stiles’s shoulder blades, clutching at the threadbare sweater he pulled on earlier. Like all the other wolves, Derek throws off heat like a wildfire, but his nose is cold where it brushes Stiles’s neck. He smells a little like the Preserve, and a lot like rainwater.

Stiles has known Derek for nearly three years. He’s seen Derek covered in blood, his own and others’; he’s seen him beaten and seen him smirking and snarling and utterly flat, seen him crack his neck and drop to all fours, bristling with dark fur and aggression. Seen him utterly still and pale on a cot at Deaton’s, bruises beneath his eyes, sweating through the sheets. Derek has become this steady, infuriating, _aching_ presence in the background of Stiles’s whole life, and Stiles, Stiles has just let him—has opened the door, kept the window unlocked, buried his hands in Derek’s fur and held on.

Much later, after Derek and Isaac and Erica have slunk back into the night, Stiles lies awake in bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling until his eyelids grow too heavy. His last thought is that tonight, in the dim kitchen, it felt like Derek was letting himself hold on, too.

 

*

 

To Stiles’s surprise, Erica’s in homeroom the next morning.

“Oh my god, why are you here?” he hisses, slamming his binder onto his desk and sliding into the chair. He’s running late but it’s not like it matters; Mr. Hayes, the biology teacher, could not give less of a shit what they get up to. He mostly eats his breakfast at his desk, and only takes attendance for the first week of the year.

Stiles twists around so he can scrutinize Erica more closely. She looks exhausted, closer to old-Erica than he’s seen in years. There’s no makeup hiding the circles under her eyes, and she’s swapped his flannel out for one of the massive jackets Boyd wears at the rink.

“Spanish test,” she says. “Here.” She digs around in her bag one-handed, emerging with his shirt and presenting it to him with a saucy wink that’s nowhere close to her usual standard. It still makes Todd Schlotzky, who sits in the row next to them, choke. Stiles glares at him and he shuts up pretty quick.

“Is your—” he starts.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Erica replies. “Still a little sore.” She’s not bothering to whisper and Stiles sees Todd’s eyes widen further. He resigns himself to fending off that particular rumor for the next week. “Listen, I told Derek this last night, but he told me to tell you too.” She lowers her voice, leaning closer. “Isaac said that I wasn’t responding to you? In the bathroom? I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember much, after that thing attacked us. I don’t even know how Isaac got us to your house. One second, there were claws in my shoulder. Then I was in your bathroom. I don’t know…” She trails off, teeth sinking into her lower lip.

Stiles had woken up late that morning and checked his phone to find 23 unread messages in the group chat, the first of which was sent by Isaac at 4:19 in the morning, a terse _BOLO: huge black dog, took a chunk out of erica’s arm, def supernatural, do not engage_. It’s a testament to exactly how insane their lives have gotten that Scott’s first response is a drawn-out _ughhhhhh_ and Jackson’s is _are u fcking kidding me lahey_.

lydia martin (6:22) how big is huge

erica reyes (6:24) big. its been 5 hrs and my shoulders still fucked

erica reyes (6:24) [image]

lydia martin (6:27) jesus christ, erica

erica reyes (6:35) [“rock on” emoji]

scott mccall (6:42) ?????????

scott mccall (6:42) has anyyone asked deatno

derek hale (7:17) I’m going by the clinic this morning. Moon tonight at warehouse as usual.

isaac lahey (7:29) can i copy the chem homework from someone

isaac lahey (7:30) by someone i mean allison or stiles

 

“Nothing?” Stiles presses now.

“Nothing,” Erica says. Then she shakes her head. “Well, the heat. I remember feeling really, really hot.”

Stiles frowns. “The house was cold. It was pouring outside. You didn’t feel warmer than usual.”

Erica shrugs her good shoulder tiredly, but whatever she’s about to say gets lost in the ringing of the bell that signals the end of homeroom. Mr. Hayes balls up his McMuffin wrapper and shoots it into the trash can by the door.

 

 

Stiles makes it to Lydia’s before Allison that night. When he lets himself into the Martin house, face raw from the biting January wind, he’s greeted by the sound of AC/DC blaring from Lydia’s bedroom. She only listens to classic rock when she’s working on a particularly knotty problem, and sure enough, when he follows the noise upstairs and peeks into the room, the chalkboard wall across from her bed is completely covered in scribbled formulas. The Supernatural Incursion graphs he showed Derek are open on the laptop resting on her desk, next to a scattering of printouts from the Argent bestiary. Lydia is scowling at the board with her hands on her hips and her hair piled atop her head in a haphazard bun. Stiles can see at least two pencils sticking out of the tangle of strawberry waves.

“What,” she demands without turning around. There’s chalk dust smeared down one sleeve of her sweater.

“Uh, it’s the full moon?” Stiles has to half-shout to be heard over the music. He hears the question in his own voice and winces.

Lydia’s spine stays almost painfully straight for a moment before she slumps and turns to face him, running a frustrated hand over her face and getting chalk all over it in the process. “I know,” she says. It sounds like an apology. “I’m trying to…” She gestures at the wall behind her. “I was hoping it would shake something loose.”

Stiles doesn’t have to ask how it’s going; he can read it in the tense twist of her lips. “I’ll wait downstairs,” he says.

Usually, between the two of them, he and Lydia can shape the facts into a theory and a theory into a plan. They work the problem from different ends, and it’s a better system than he could have ever hoped for. The last few months have been different. Neither of them have turned up anything useful, anything that even hints at a key to stopping the influx of supernatural predators to Beacon Hills. Lydia won’t ever admit defeat, but it’s starting to feel like they might just need to batten down the hatches, ride out the storm, and hope that Deaton is right and the flood will slow of its own accord.  

As he heads back down the stairs, he can’t help thinking that Lydia looks exactly as happy with that idea as he feels. _Blood on the rocks, blood on the streets, blood in the sky, blood on the sheets,_ Bon Scott promises him at maximum volume. _If you want blood, you got it._

 

“Can I ask you a question?” Stiles asks, three hours and an unknown number glasses of wine later.

“Shoot,” Lydia says. Allison’s inside, trying to sound sober while she’s on the phone with her father, so it’s just the two of them lying on the reclining lawn chairs in Lydia’s backyard, wrapped up like taquitos in thick blankets she pulled from one of the seventeen thousand closets in the Martin living room. The stars are startlingly clear, the way they only get in midwinter when the air is sharp enough.

Stiles inhales and exhales slowly, watching his breath puff and dissolve into the darkness. “It’s a dumb one,” he warns her.

Lydia’s tone is teasing. “Don’t worry, Stilinski, I figured.”

“How’d you decide to—to—last year. You stopped pretending to be an idiot.”

“I’m waiting for an interrogative,” Lydia prods.

“How’d you decide to change? Just like that?”

Stiles knows it was a conscious decision; it happened too quickly to be anything else. One day, just a week or two after Gerard died, she’d shown up at school and it was like she’d shed a layer—still sharp, but without the calculation behind it. Without the intent to deceive, to be anything other than the best. At lunch she’d dropped her tray down next to Scott’s, ignored Boyd’s raised eyebrows, and given Erica a smile that was half determination and half bared teeth.  

Now Lydia hums consideringly, looking up at the sky. Stiles is willing to bet that she can name all the visible constellations.“It just seemed useless,” she says after a moment. “The whole thing. The charade. I used to—” she breaks off and twists her body to face him, regarding him with serious eyes. “I used to care so much about being popular. Being _liked._ ” She laughs a little. “Still do, I guess, but not the same way. After Jackson, I just—it felt juvenile. Immature. Like I’d been looking at the picture all wrong the whole time. I felt so stupid for not having seen it earlier.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. He gets that. It’s something they’ve all had to come to terms with in the last few years, this huge shift in perspective. Around them, Beacon Hills has stayed the same, barring the monster problem. But they’ve changed. They’ve changed irrevocably. Earlier that day in the locker room after gym, Stiles had hunched over his phone to text Allison, who had study hall, about checking the bestiary for information on the dog. _did it try to actually eat them or was it just being a dick??_ Allison had sent. Somewhere behind him, Sam Chung had made a joke about his weed stash and mattresses, and half the guys in the locker room had laughed.

Even thinking about it makes him feel like the whiny protagonist in a teen movie, but sometimes the distance between Stiles’s life and the lives being lived around him seems so great, he might as well be on a different planet. But then he looks up—sees Isaac leaning against a bank of lockers, half-asleep, and Jackson, the dickwad, trying to hide a wince at the Axe cologne one of the freshmen has just sprayed—and is reminded that at least he’s not alone.

“I want to go to MIT,” Lydia tells him. He already knows; they edited each other’s college application essays. “I want to survive long enough to get there, and then long enough to graduate, and then long enough to—long enough to grow up. To have a life, a career.” She takes a deep breath. “And I want my friends to survive, too.”

“And that’s the mood for senior year,” Stiles says. It’s a joke, but he’s also being completely serious. He knows Lydia understands.

“Yeah,” she sighs, flopping back over to face the stars and the heavy, full moon again. “That’s the mood.” 

 

The next morning, Stiles wakes up to the sight of Lydia’s bedroom ceiling, dim but slowly warming with the soft, hazy glow of sunrise. Lydia is curled into his side, fists tucked under her chin, and her hair is covering half his face, tickling his nose with every breath. When he has to extricate his hand to bat it away, he realizes that the warm weight on his stomach is Allison, who’s using it as a pillow. Lydia makes a disgruntled noise and squirms closer until her nose digs into his ribs. Allison blinks up at him, already awake. There are two empty bottles of wine visible on the bedside table and he feels sort of extremely gross all over, but it doesn’t seem to matter just yet, because he’s also warm and enormously comfortable.

“I feel like this is fine,” Allison says, “as long as we never move again.” She is a mind reader. Lydia groans in sleepy agreement. They lie there in the early morning quiet for an indeterminate span of time. He might fall back asleep. Then he feels Lydia roll onto her back, away from him.

“Hnnng,” she says. It’s probably the least articulate she’s ever been. Stiles can hear her fumbling around, knocking one of the wine bottles onto the carpet, but is too lazy to actually turn to see what she’s doing. “Jesus,” she swears. There’s a plasticky crinkling sound and then a bottle of water enters his field of vision. It’s half full and he manages to take a few swallows without sitting up or choking before he passes it to Allison, who finishes it off.

Stiles finds his phone in the tangle of blankets and squints at the screen until it comes into focus.

stiles stilinski (2:33) hhow is moon!!!!!!!!

scott mccall (5:19) good

scott mccall (5:22) like actually good

 

Stiles’s eyebrows rise of their own accord and he drops the phone back on the bed. That’s unusually high praise from Scott.

Another moment passes, or possibly an hour, while they all stare up at the ceiling and contemplate their hangovers. It feels nice, Stiles thinks. Not the hangover; that’s awful and getting steadily worse as his brain comes fully online. But this part. The warmth of Lydia’s expensive duvet. Allison’s sharp chin where it’s digging into his spleen.  

“Love you losers,” Allison says after a minute.

“Disgusting,” Lydia replies.

“God, Allison,” Stiles adds. “Keep it to yourself.” But he turns his face into Lydia’s hair and yelps as Allison jabs him between the ribs and thinks, as hard as he possibly can: _Yeah, okay._ _Me too._

 

*

 

Two weeks go by with no sign of the dog.

Derek deals with four more omegas. Stiles doesn’t even find out about the first two until the day after; true to his word, Derek’s been looping Isaac, Erica, and Boyd in more, and the four of them are more than a match for the feral, half-starved omegas that have been showing up on the outskirts of town. Stiles doesn’t mind. He’s actually had time to study for his AP US History test and draft an essay on colonialism in Shakespeare for English. But the respite doesn’t last forever; early on Tuesday morning, he’s awoken by the sound of a body falling heavily to the floor of his bedroom.

“Derek,” he says, refusing to open his eyes. “If that’s you, you’d better not be bleeding on anything.”

“What if it wasn’t me?” Derek demands. Stiles groans and opens his eyes. Derek is, unsurprisingly, bleeding on things. At least none of his wounds look fatal.

“Ugh, you’re the worst,” he bitches, but rolls out of bed anyway and takes some of Derek’s weight when they stagger to the bathroom, communicating mostly in pissy facial expressions and jabbed fingers because his dad worked a late shift and is asleep down the hall. When Stiles has turned the shower on for camouflage, he turns back around to find Derek in the process of stripping off his shirt. He jerks his gaze away from Derek’s blood-smeared abdominal muscles and studiously examines the wallpaper behind his shoulder. 

“What happened?” he asks, mostly to have something to say. If Derek was dying, he would have told Stiles right off. Probably.

“Omegas.”

“Hah!” Stiles crows, momentarily distracted from the broad lines of Derek’s shoulders. “Double event?”

Derek nods. “I’d already sent Isaac back to the apartment and I didn’t want to run through town looking like…” he makes a gesture that encompasses most of his body, the other hand working at his belt. Stiles refrains from informing him that most of the population of Beacon Hills would not be averse to a shirtless and attractively-bloodied Derek Hale jogging by. “Your house was closest.”      

“Sure,” Stiles says. It’s barely past six in the morning. Too early for this. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Derek ease out of his jeans and step into the spray of the shower. In the privacy of his head, the _Kill Bill_ sirens are blaring. Werewolves have _no_ body shame. “Clothes,” he announces nonsensically, and then makes his escape. Derek knows where the Stilinskis keep their towels. If Freshman Stiles could see himself now, he’d be speechless.

Half an hour later, Derek is next to him in the Jeep, looking unusually soft in a worn Beacon County Fire Department Fun Run 1993 sweatshirt. He’s clutching a mug of black coffee and his hair is freshly-toweled, sticking up a little. Stiles has already slammed his own first mug and is working on his second. He feels marginally more awake. Unfortunately, the caffeine has not made him feel any more equipped to deal with Gentle Derek. Whiskey might be more effective, but he has a math test this morning.

“Do you have time to stop at the bakery?” Derek asks him.

They stop at the bakery. It’s early enough that the bread is still warm, and Derek buys two loaves of sourdough and then three full bags of miscellaneous baked goods. At first Stiles thinks he’s just trying to carb load for healing reasons, but when Derek turns to him and asks him what Scott likes, he realizes he’s misread the situation.

“Turnovers,” he tells the man behind the counter. This is already the weirdest Tuesday of his life, and it’s not even seven hours old yet.

Instead of directing him back to his shitty apartment, Derek has Stiles drop him off about a mile away, at the edge of one of the more rural neighborhoods that border the Preserve. The houses are further apart and larger, surrounded by actual yards and gardens. The area is familiar; Stiles thinks he’s hurdled some of the fences out here during one of their regularly-scheduled supernatural emergencies, but it was dark and there was a harpy chasing him, so he can’t be positive. He’s not sure why Derek wants to be dropped off out here, either, but the Camaro is parked on the street, and Derek is getting out of the Jeep before he can ask, paper-wrapped sourdough tucked close to his side.

Stiles makes it to homeroom with ten minutes to spare, and the looks on Erica and Jackson’s faces when he passes them fresh pastries—a massive cinnamon roll for Erica and a chocolate croissant for Jackson—are probably a mirror of his own, when he roots around in the bag and finds a smaller packet of rugelach, his favorite, at the bottom.

 

*

 

“Explain,” Lydia demands a few days later. A golden afternoon has slipped quickly into dusk around them, the last of the sunset vanishing from the fresh snow on the ground. They’re walking in the woods by the burnt-out shell of the Hale house, which, okay. Stupid. But visiting the house is part of Lydia’s self-prescribed post-Peter exposure therapy and anyway, Stiles has a Ziploc baggie of mountain ash in his backpack if they need it.

Derek’s family’s home was a one-road-in, one-road-out kind of deal. Now that nobody lives here, the county snowplows don’t bother clearing the road, so they’ve been parking half a mile out and walking the rest of the way all winter.

“Explain what?”

“Derek,” she says flatly.

“Oh,” Stiles says, “that.” He blows out a long breath. “I’m not sure. If he weren’t still so emotionally constipated I’d worry about body snatchers or whatever, but.”

“No, it’s definitely him.” Lydia sounds like she’s taken the possibility seriously too. God, their lives are weird.

Stiles takes the time to think through his next words carefully. “I think,” he says at last, “Derek is working through some stuff.” _He has plants_ , he doesn’t say out loud. _He likes fresh bread and Shakespeare and he’s only twenty-four and last week he told me that he once saw Sleigh Bells live and it was a borderline religious experience._

Sometimes he dreams about that summer night he and Scott dug Laura Hale up from the dirt. He dreams about the tangles of wolfsbane and soft soil around the burial site. About the way the dirt got ground into his skin, the way it trickled off of Laura’s awkwardly splayed arms like rivulets of water. He wonders if Derek’s been digging himself out, too. 

Lydia opens her mouth to reply but stops walking instead, so abruptly that Stiles continues on past her for a few steps before looking up to see what’s wrong.

“Shit,” he breathes. He reaches behind him blindly, managing to find Lydia’s wrist. “Lydia.”

“Uh huh,” Lydia agrees faintly.

It looks, Stiles thinks, like a normal dog. Except for the way it seems to blend into the gloaming darkness, like it’s half-shadow itself. Except for its eyes, which are aglow with a cool white light. Stiles tries to remember the lecture on canine body language Deaton gave him three years ago when he helped Scott out at the clinic for a summer. Ears back is bad news. Raised hackles are a sign of stress, not necessarily aggression. The dog in front of him doesn’t look particularly stressed, but then, he’s not sure that whatever this is follows the same rules as Georgie, Mrs. Feltzman’s boxer. Mostly, it looks mean. Its lips are drawn back in a silent snarl. The blue twilight makes its teeth gleam.

When it prowls towards them, Lydia takes a stumbling step back, yanking Stiles with her. The dog’s snarling ratchets up a notch and, wow, Stiles never thought he’d miss the wolves’ nearly sub-vocal growl, but he does now. Compared to the noises ripping their way out of the dog’s throat, Derek sounds like a purring kitten.

It takes another step forward, and then another. And then they’re running.

Stiles has spent a lot of time running for his life in these woods. It never gets any easier. The world tunnels down to the sound of his pulse thundering in his ears and his desperate attempts to keep his feet under him in the forest floor, which is slippery with snowmelt. He lets go of Lydia almost immediately; they both need their arms for balance and anyway she’s just as fast as he is, thankfully wearing sensible sneakers for once. Her red hair streams behind her like a fiery beacon. 

His breath is uneven and desperate, thundering in his ears so loudly that it nearly blocks out the sounds of the dog crashing through the forest after him. He half-slides, half-scrambles down a steep embankment, sees Lydia glance backwards to make sure he’s still behind her. Her eyes are wide and frightened but he can’t spare the breath to say anything. Everything has narrowed to the ground in front of him, the fallen branches and the trunks of saplings and the dark holes of Lydia’s footprints. A branch whips across his cheek, and then another, as he’s forced to slip sideways through a narrow gap between two trees. He changes his gait awkwardly to avoid a thick tangle of roots that look like white snakes under the snow.

That’s all it takes.

A line of fire sears down his back, too sudden to even be painful. At the same moment an immense weight bears him down to the dirt. He has enough presence of mind to roll over so he’s not on his stomach. The instant he does so, overwhelming agony tears through his right side, a ripping of flesh that makes him scream until the air is crushed out of his lungs.

The scream is raw when it breaks free from his throat. He didn’t even know his body could make that sound. The dog’s enormous foreleg pins him to the ground, pressing on his sternum with so much pressure he’s afraid his ribs will snap like twigs. Above him, its twin lantern-eyes are aglow. Past its shadowy form and through the skeletal boughs of the trees, the sky is winter-clear and glittering with emerging stars.

There’s blood on the dog’s teeth. _That’s mine_ , Stiles thinks detachedly. Then the heat crashes over him like a wave, and he loses the capacity to think anything at all.

 

At some point, the weight on his chest vanishes. There’s a horrible, high yelping noise. Stiles’ head lolls to the side, more due to gravity than any voluntary movement. The dog’s heavy body is skidding across the snow, leaving a black trail of blood and exposed loam behind it. Its eyes flicker, oddly mechanical, like a flashlight with a weak battery. Stiles feels himself breathe in, a desperate, stuttering gulp that stretches his ribs until he nearly cries out again.

Things flash by too quickly to grasp, a sickening blur of sensation: Lydia’s wild eyes fixed on something beyond him. The perfect round of her mouth. His own mouth, wet with the taste of copper. His hands, scrabbling uselessly through the snow-covered leaves on the forest floor.

Someone is wheezing for air, an awful thin, hitching breath, halfway between a gasp and a sob. It’s him, he realizes, and tries to stop, can’t tell if he succeeds. He’s losing time between one blink and the next. Everything is happening too fast for his feverish mind to process. Voices—he can’t tell whose. They sound very far away and he can’t make out the words. There’s the nauseating lurch of movement, first jarring and then smooth. Streetlights shuttering past. Rough fabric beneath his cheek, his own choked breathing.

Over it all, the impossible heat. He’s aflame, shuddering waves of fire chasing every thought out of his body until there’s no room for anything else. Like he’s about to burn right out of himself. There’s a touch against his face, and the feeling of warm skin on his makes him gasp in pain. Bright fluorescents. _Oh_ , Stiles realizes. His eyes are open.

“—iles I swear to God, if you do not snap out of this I will fucking kill you.” Scott. He’s cursing, which is bad news. Scott hasn’t sworn since seventh grade parent-teacher conferences, when Miss Henshaw suggested that lack of a male authority figure was responsible for Scott’s foul mouth, and Mrs. McCall almost punched her and then cried when they got home.

“Hey, Scotty,” Stiles slurs. He swallows thickly. It feels like swallowing a live coal. His limbs are heavy. Above him, a fuzzy shape is gradually resolving into Scott’s face, his brows knit together in worry.

“Oh, dude. Dude. Do you—what’s the date? What’s your name?”

“Mieczyslaw,” Stiles manages.

“ _What_ ,” someone says.

Stiles shifts, or tries to. The movement sends an unbearable pain echoing through his side and he stops, choking on a wounded noise. Scott’s face is blurring once more, wavering like a desert mirage. The heat surges back.

“No no no, buddy, don’t move—”

“Hot,” Stiles gasps. His vision is swimming; the lights are so bright that a tear escapes and runs down the side of his face. It burns as it goes, like it’s evaporating into steam. The lights grow even brighter.

“Stiles, don’t you dare—” It’s Derek’s most threatening voice, but even that isn’t enough to keep his eyes from sliding shut again.

 

*

 

Stiles swims back to consciousness. Someone is speaking, though his brain registers it as sound before it recognizes it as speech with words and meaning.

“—a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again,” the voice is saying. “And then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.”

He blinks groggily. Derek’s sitting on the bed, his hip pressed against Stiles’ shoulder, one hand holding a battered copy of the _Tempest_ and the other resting on Stiles’ wrist. His veins are black, from his fingers to his forearm, until they disappear under the sleeve of the t-shirt that stretches over his stupidly enormous bicep. The book is an old edition with a cracked spine.

It feels strange to be back in the world again, somehow. Like it stopped existing for a while. Or maybe that was Stiles. He has no idea what day it is, or whose clothes he’s wearing.

“Hey.” The word comes out in a dry rasp that becomes a cough partway through.

“Hey,” Derek says back. “The dog’s dead, Lydia’s fine, your dad thinks you’re with Scott for the weekend.” He slips an old receipt into the book and sets it aside before he turns to Stiles. The expression on his face is one of relief.

“Does it hurt?” Stiles asks.

“That’s my line,” says Derek. He sounds like he’s thinking of maybe checking Stiles for a heretofore undiscovered traumatic brain injury and also, a little, like he’s worried. Stiles doesn’t want to read into things, because he’s not 100% convinced he’s awake. When one of the werewolves take his pain, which has happened with unfortunate frequency in the past few years, it always makes him feel like all the molecules in his body are floating around weirdly.

“The pain drain thing,” he clarifies. He tries to gesture at Derek’s arm, but his own isn’t responding quite right. The room around him is unfamiliar. Only that’s not true, he thinks muzzily. The sheets that are tangled around him are familiar black cotton, a long rip along the top seam. He knows the duvet too, a warm puff of dark gray. He’s just groggy enough: the realization that he can recognize Derek Hale’s bedding isn’t freaking him out like it normally would. But this can’t be Derek’s room. Because the ceiling of Derek’s apartment is waterstained, not whitewashed. Because the windows in this room are large and uncurtained, letting in more light than Derek’s apartment bedroom has ever seen.  

“Are you squatting again?” he demands. “Oh my god, is someone trusting you to housesit?”

“No,” Derek says shortly. Stiles manages to get his elbows under him. He’s trembling, and the movement sends his stomach rolling so viciously that he can feel himself pale.

“Stiles, stop, you idiot,” Derek says, jolting forward to push Stiles back down to the pillow with his free hand. The other one doesn’t let go of Stiles’ wrist and Stiles focuses on the warmth of Derek’s calloused palm as he struggles to control the nausea. Normally he’d be bitching at Derek but he really doesn’t want to try moving again for a while. A tingling sensation, strangely distant, stretches up his back and along his side, threatening to surge up again if Derek releases him.

“It aches,” Derek says finally, once he’s gotten Stiles semi-settled back against the headboard. “Not too bad. And I live here. I moved.”

Stiles punches down the feeling of betrayal Derek’s words stir up—he’d had vague plans of dragging Derek to the Sacramento IKEA the next time he changed shitty apartments, or got evicted because of the murder board, because the idea of helping a werewolf pick out brightly-patterned curtains is hilarious to him—and instead scrapes together his few functioning brain cells to make sense of Derek’s tone. He’s taciturn as usual, but there’s something else there. Something a little shy. Sure enough, when Stiles checks, there’s a slight flush of pink on his ears.

Derek is embarrassed. His mouth is set stubbornly but it’s there, in the way he won’t quite meet Stiles’ eyes. It’s enough to make Stiles pause and bite back the first few comments that come to his tongue. He looks around more carefully. The rubber plant— _Ficus elastica_ , supplies the part of Stiles’ brain that can’t let anything go—is sitting on an unfinished wooden end table.

There’s a bookshelf. Like, an honest-to-god bookshelf, with Derek’s books on it. Stiles has never seen them outside of the milk crates he usually chucks them in. _Derek bought a house_ , he thinks. And then:

“You’re building,” he realizes out loud, the pieces falling into place at last. “You’re staying.”

 

*

 

It’s another four hours before Stiles is up to moving. Derek hadn’t said anything in response to Stiles’s revelation, and Stiles himself had fallen back asleep embarrassingly quickly. When he wakes up, some of the pain has returned, bringing mental clarity with it. Derek’s in the doorway and Stiles wants to grill him on the dog—hellhound, he realizes now, of fucking course—but there’s a noise further into the house, the clatter of shoes being kicked off and Erica’s laughter, and all of a sudden Stiles wants to see his friends so badly he’s halfway out of bed before Derek can cross the room, the door closing behind him.

“Slow down,” Derek orders. He does. He grabs Derek’s hand before Derek can start doing his pain drain thing again.

“Stop hurting yourself,” Stiles counters. Derek’s eyes widen in the way that makes him look unspeakably young again. Stiles hates and loves this expression in equal measure. All the emotion that’s normally distributed across Derek’s face vanishes, the irritation and defensiveness and weariness, only to shine, too-truthful and vulnerable, from his stupid technicolor eyes. This face has shown up on some of the worst days of Stiles’s life, but it still feels like a horrible, awful gift whenever he gets to see it.

Beyond the door, Stiles hears Scott’s voice say something unintelligible, and Boyd’s much lower voice answer him. “Why the fuck is _Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse_ on my watch list?” Jackson demands. There’s another chorus of laughter.

Stiles tunes them out. Derek’s still staring at him, and Stiles squares his shoulders before he tugs Derek down to sit beside him on the bed again.

“Everyone feels weird about leaving,” he says carefully. He’s pretty sure he’s right, pretty sure he understands, but Derek’s looking flighty again, cracked-open, and this is one of those unspoken things that they never do: pressing painfully close to each other’s bruises, and then leaving before the damage becomes permanent. Stiles doesn’t want to back off, this time. And he doesn’t think Derek wants him to, either. “But nobody knew—they didn’t know they had a reason to stay.”

“You…” Derek pauses, takes a breath. “They don’t have to stay, I’m not trying to _make_ them—I just—I wanted them to want to _come back_. After.”

“That was your resolution,” Stiles says. “You wanted to make a home. Again. You wanted to build a home again.”

Derek won’t look at him. “New year.”

“New me,” Stiles finishes. He feels off-balance. “Jesus, Derek. Old you was fine.”

“No, he wasn’t,” says Derek. He draws in another slow breath. “This house has a huge yard. It backs right up against the preserve. It’ll be good for the full moons.”

“I like the plant,” Stiles says. “Still needs a name, though.”

 

*

 

When Stiles wakes up the next morning, Derek’s still there, face relaxed and chest moving evenly with his breathing. The air is heavy and cold, the way it gets after snowfall. Over the Preserve the sun is rising and the glow of it spills clean and bright and golden from the window and across the floor.

Soon, Derek will wake up, and Stiles will suggest waffles and text everyone when Derek’s not looking. Nobody’s had to kill or maim anyone in over forty-eight hours. The house will be full of the smell of breakfast and the sound of the pack, and no matter how hard Derek will try to seem disgruntled, he won’t be able to keep his smile out of his eyes. And they can do this forever, Stiles thinks sleepily. They will always have this to come home to.

So far, the year’s looking pretty good. 


End file.
